Do you have something that does not fit under our other threads? Maybe you want to know our tactics about how to keep seagulls off the terrace? Or how many hours Nils has dedicated to theorising about the best rate of survival for jumping off the building’s roof and into the water below? Maybe Ashley’s secret fruit fly recipe? Go for it!

What is this “Ask A Dev” thing?

Every week we will feature an ongoing Q&A session from an area within Arrowhead, called “Ask A Dev”. It’s a chance for you to ask us questions in the weekly pinned topic (Art, Programming, Design, Marketing etc.).

Due to contracts and confidentiality agreements, we may not always be allowed to answer some questions. However, there’s no harm in asking and we will try and answer as best we can!

Im going first, since we have Cyborgs here why they don’t “repair” themself anymore?
Like in old previews of the game. They were dead and after few secs just woke up with a big hole in the head haha. That was amazing!

Such a good question. Most of the time I go by the ideal that a good concept should prove to be a fun mechanic but this was one of those cases where it wasn’t.

The problem was to make the Cyborgs fun to shoot - when they got back up, it mostly felt frustrating (And this can of course be used a gameplay element, just look at super meat boy). But when we tested it, it didn’t feel right - this could’ve been solved by adding additional systems to show that they’re damaged and so forth, but then the reality of game development hits you - we had to create three different factions and a galactic campaign in a very short time.

We found that it was something that could be overpowered when play testing.It wasn’t, but we know that you, the community, are much better than us when it comes to abusing (and I say that in the most positive light) systems and finding a way to make it OP.

I’m super proud of Helldivers, I know there’s a million things I’d want to improve, but the reality of game development is as Mark Rogers, our producer at Sony, said “Games are never released, they merely escape”.

The biggest challenge was without doubt the galactic campaign, it’s something that could be much better and interesting - it was however more of a proof of a crazy idea (world wide coop, who has done that before!?!).

Sales was great, beyond the upper scale the project was scoped for

Sony’s super happy, and as they put it “learned a lot about how to support a title after release” with our idea of creating both (significant) free DLC and tailored paid DLC (to support further development).

And for the last question, that’s highly confidential soldier, you’re on a need-to-know basis

I think it is fun, but definitely not over powered and where it is being strong, it continues to be very high risk of friendly fire (giving and receiving). Having just two uses of two very fragile Obliterator turrets actually makes these the weakest turret option in the game.

The most OP thing in the game is the AT-47 because it is super strong, doesn’t self-inflict much at all, and you get three uses of these per Stratagem slot giving you lots of shots each that you can control that clear groups of bunched enemies (including multiple IFV or Warlords with single shot). That gets 3 uses per stratagem slot while the Obliterator Turret is getting just 2 feels very off to me. I think you have to keep these as is in the game because there are people that do still play solo and for them getting stuck with an RS, the AT-47 allows a relatively easy solo option.

Back to Obliterator Turret, having just the 2 uses is generally sufficient for normal missions, but being limited to just 2 per Stratagem slot for Hell Dive RS missions limits their practicality. I mean even more than their tendency to self-destruct or get destroyed very easily by stray / careless friendly fire.

NeverShift_McDouche:

Mark Rogers, our producer at Sony, said “Games are never released, they merely escape”

I am sure I have heard that before. Reminded me of famous quote “A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.” from Shigeru Miyamoto. Of course that was before the age of post-release patches

I agree that there are drawbacks - one of our big fears when it comes to releasing new stuff is that it’ll be OP. We’d rather release something that we think is underpowered and then see what the community can do with it. (I’m looking at you, smoke barrage).

There’s many smart people in the games industry, and it’s a wonderful thing to get to work with them. As for Mr. Miyamoto’s quote, I still think it holds true. You can always patch, but you can “never” redo the core mechanics of a game.

This is why, when I see people say “the game’s only in beta, it may have been fixed in the release version” I usually think “That’s now how game development works, if they want to fix the issue people are complaining of, they have to redo the entire game”.

Usually it’s stuff like “movement speeds are too fast” or something similar, which is connected to the size of the world, the accuracy of the guns, the speed of projectiles and so forth.

Game development is like the butterfly effect, one single thing has massive repercussions. We have that issue right now in our new title where the team doesn’t stick together - and the problem is that the world is too big. (Big world = faster movement speed = harder to notice position changes of team mates). We’re fixing it as I speak, but it took us a good while to realize the problem and the solution.

I assumed it was a resource issue - trying to conserve helldiver reinforcement pods so they don’t run out mid mission lol.
Some people still need to learn the 3 core rules when deploying certain stratagems -
Location
Location
Location

We found that it was something that could be overpowered when play testing.It wasn’t, but we know that you, the community, are much better than us when it comes to abusing (and I say that in the most positive light) systems and finding a way to make it OP.

That’s why

I’m sure that maybe there is a way to make them OP, but I haven’t seen it yet. Can you comment on why the new GL-8 stops working when enemies get too close? Even though plenty more freedom haters are in range, if one scout gets through, it attacks unabated while the turret just sits there. This and the fact you only get 2 makes them feel anything but OP so far.